A key part of Xbox’s plans for the mobile business have been put on hold once more thanks to the US courts, says president Sarah Bond.
Xbox has repeatedly said that it would be launching its own “gamer-first” app store since its deal to acquire Activision Blizzard was working its way through regulators.
Its most recent public assertion was last month, when Xbox said that a US court ruling designed to open up the Android ecosystem meant it would allow users to “play and purchase Xbox games directly from the Xbox App on Android” by this month.
But this is now on ice after the US court allowed Google more time to fall into line with its rulings, said Xbox president Sarah Bond on Bluesky.
[UPDATE: As gamesindustry.biz notes, The Verge obtained a statement from Google about the situation: “Microsoft has always been able to offer their Android users the ability to play and purchase Xbox games directly from their app – they’ve simply chosen not to,” Google told the Verge]
”At Xbox, we want to offer players more choice on how and where they play, including being able to play and buy games directly from the Xbox app,” she said.
“I recently shared our ambition to unlock these features first with the Google Play Store on Android devices in the U.S. while other app stores adapt to meet consumer demand.”
“Due to a temporary administrative stay recently granted by the courts, we are currently unable to launch these features as planned. Our team has the functionality built and ready to go live as soon as the court makes a final decision.”
“We are eager to launch and give more choice and flexibility to players.”
Xbox has made multiple public statements about what it is doing on mobile, but none of it has truly materialised.
It was Xbox boss Bond who originally announced the Xbox app store back in May, during the Bloomberg Technology Summit. At the time, she said it would launch in July, and that its first party titles like Candy Crush and Minecraft would be part of the store. It would start out as a web store initially, and then would start to add third party titles after launch.
But since then, as we’ve reported previously, there’s been very little information out in the market since. Our sources suggest Xbox has a handful of publishers under NDA, but others said they have enquired about placing their games on the store but came away with nothing. And once its original July launch window had passed Xbox told us that the store was “progressing well” – but did not confirm a date or any other details.
